Month: August 2009

Sloterdijk on Apartments

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gropius office 1923

Some thoughts from Peter Sloterdijk on the spatiality of apartments:

“I interpret apartment construction as the creation of a world-island for a single person. To understand this, you need to concede that the word world not only means the big whole that God and other jovial observers have before them. From the outset, worlds take the stage in the plural and have an insular structure. Islands are miniatures of worlds that can be inhabited as world models. For this reason, one must know what constitutes a minimally complete island, one capable of being a world.”

“You must understand that houses are initially machines to kill time… In other words, people initially only live in a house because they confess to the conviction that it is rewarding to await an event outside the house.”

“I claim that the apartment (along with the sports stadium) is the primary architectural icon of the 20th century. A monadology is needed to think the interior today. One man—one apartment. One monad—one world cell…”

“Modern apartment construction rests on a celibate-based ontology… the architects of the one-person apartments have enabled the mass version of a historically singular type of human being—at best it was otherwise prefigured by the Christian hermit monks.”

“Being means someone (1) being together with someone else (2) and with something else (3) in something (4)… A house is a three-dimensional answer to the question of how someone can be together with someone and something in something.”

An alternative to Heidegger’s fourfold, perhaps. Sloterdijk calls Heidegger the last rural thinker (burn). I think it would be true to say that Heidegger doesn’t find much to admire in the urban context.

Walter Gropius, Office interior, 1923

Loops

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russian cosmonaut life support system diagram

We never begin anything on a blank slate – there are always already things in progress, things that may have gone around hundreds of times before. We are continually stepping in and out of loops. They enfold us, entangle us – it is a wonder we do not see our own backs. Water molecules are so mobile that a glass of water from your tap today almost certainly contains at least one molecule of the water Jesus was baptised in. Your blood circulates, circadian rhythms governed by daylight control your digestive systems, your brain chemistry, and your body temperature. Your sleep phases are cyclical. Even in the linear expedition of walking from A to B, we employ the biomechanical cycle of walking: the same step repeated many times. Runners analyse their gait in great detail, looking for the most efficient biomechanical loop. Oscillations of rubidium atoms and vibrations of quartz crystals permit us to measure time. Weather patterns like El Niño and glacial periods recur more-or-less regularly. The Arctic Tern migrates from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again every year. The pro-surfing circuit follows summer around the globe. Our planet turns, the moon passes through its phases, our star, throbbing with cyclical sunspots circles the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

A loop begins and ends in the same place. A loop can be a path: the Link bus route, a holiday roadtrip, fitness trails, heritage walks, the planned new rail link under the city from Britomart to Mt Eden. Routines and habits are often cyclical: most days we go to the same places, eat according to the same ritualised practices, perhaps live from paycheck to paycheck, or work at a job that requires us to do the same thing repeatedly. Most hospital visits are return visits. How many times have you been to the same movie theatre? Rituals can be mind-numbing or Sisyphean, but equally comforting or enriching. Many of our mechanisms are based on loops, cycles, oscillations, vibrations: scuba rebreathers, amplifiers and synthesisers, software AI routines. Recycling, rehabilitating, and reusing are processes which attempt to close loops to reduce wastage, or to produce waste which can be fed into other cycles and processes.

We habitually address exceptional spaces; spaces for special events; the out-of-the-ordinary; the linear; the historical. But what about the cyclical, the repeated, the looped?

Chilling

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Philippe Rahm, <em>Digestible Gulfstream</em> at the Venice Biennale, 2008

Philippe Rahm, Digestible Gulfstream at the Venice Biennale, 2008

In Philippe Rahm’s Digestible Gulfstream (2008), two polite innocuous elements are separated by a distance of several metres. One sits just off the floor, a white rectanglar slab with a corner folded up. The other is suspended, with a corresponding corner folded down. The lower element is heated, while the other cooled. The effect produced is a loop of air cycling up from the ground, and descending as it cools. The space, which was installed at the 2008 Venice Biennale, is what Rahm describes as an “invisible landscape… a plastic, dynamic activation of forces and polarities that generate a landscape of heat… literally structured on a current of air, opening up a fluid, airy, atmospheric space” (AD 79, 2009: 33).

The space was inhabited by a languid, intermittently-dressed group, who could seek out the ideal climatic conditions for their current activities. But what are these activities? As it turns out: tinkering on a little keyboard, sleeping, playing cards, chatting in a little circle…

Philippe Rahm, <em>Digestible Gulfstream</em>, 2008

Philippe Rahm, Digestible Gulfstream, 2008


Philippe Rahm, <em>Digestible Gulfstream</em>, 2008

Philippe Rahm, Digestible Gulfstream, 2008

A group of drawings by illustrator Piero Macola for this project show it removed to a forest clearing. And here again, there is distinct air of laziness (perhaps chilling would be a thermally-appropriate term). The denizens of this clearing rub warming ointments onto each other’s backs, read, sleep, and bask in the sun. There’s a hint here of the old-fashioned futurism of thinking that with robots to do our jobs, we could all adopt Edenic lives of leisure (assuming the popularly-imagined version of the garden of Eden, where it was just a really nice park, not a space of inconceivable relationship with God).

Although Digestible Gulfstream may at first glance be one of those impossibly high-tech projects, it’s also worth observing that it maintains a streak of quite conventional primitivism. Joseph Rykwert’s On Adam’s House in Paradise traces the longstanding fascination architects have had with the idea of the first architecture. The idea that architecture occurs at precisely the moment when nature becomes culture has been persistent. The forest clearing becomes a site for this imagined transfer. Amongst the forest-clearing stories, Reyner Banham’s is my favourite:

“A savage tribe (of the sort that exists only in parables) arrives at an evening camp-site and finds it well-supplied with fallen timber. Two basic methods of exploiting the environmental potential of that timber exist: either it may be used to construct a wind-break or rain-shed—the structural solution—or it may be used to build a fire—the power-operated solution. An ideal tribe of noble rationalists would consider the amount of wood available, make an estimate of the probable weather for the night—wet, windy, or cold—and dispose of its timber resources accordingly. A real tribe, being the inheritors of ancient cultural predispositions would do nothing of the sort, of course, and would either make fire or build a shelter according to prescribed custom—and that… is what Western, civilised nations still do, in most cases.”

Enclosure or fire? As Luis Fernández-Galiano points out, “an entire theory of architecture is encapsulated in this simple question”. “Architecture,” he writes, “can be understood as a material organization that regulates and brings order to energy flows; and simultaneously and inseparably, as an energetic organization that stabilizes and maintains material forms”.

Banham goes on to talk mostly about work-spaces: hospitals, parking garages, offices, shops, banks. Energy is potential work (that’s its technical definition, anyway). But Rahm’s project seeks stasis (although the air is moving, it is in cyclical equilibrium). Of course Digestible Gulfstream is a prototype, a demonstration, so perhaps it isn’t to be taken too seriously. But I’d be interested to know how work fits into the picture.

Sleeping Over

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Still from <em>The Prisoner</em>, BBC Television, 1967

Still from The Prisoner, BBC Television, 1967

1. I went to sleep and I had three dreams.  I dreamed I was stretched out on a square wheel by an little old architect.  He made me a ballistic machine and pulled me tight until I made clear and equal sounds.  He reckoned me and aimed me and pinned me by my navel.  He spoke often and loudly and his voice echoed down the long hall, returning only parts of his speech and denounced me and my foolish dream:  “Why are you looking at me in such an unseemly way?  I have saved you forever.  These lines, rerum apta conlocatio elegansque.”  He broke into Latin and when I spoke he gave me a black eye and insisted on silence.  I was on axis and the man in his foolishness made me the measure of the universe.  I was in plan, and the man trapped me like a fish and the savage lines burned my fingers and my hair grew long as I wheeled the stars around me and men in robes came in and thought about me for reassurance, and then left and women weren’t allowed.  A hundred years later the old man spoke again smiling enigmatically and writing in a mirror and made everyone see me and know what I looked like.  He gave me an extra pair of arms and two new legs that didn’t fit me, but fitted my wheel as I measured, elemental, universal and consumed space.

b. I woke angry at property developers and found my house was dark and my watch had stopped, its luminous hands fixed in place by the number 9 which had come loose under the glass.  My bed was tightly made around me and I was too hot. I had a headache behind my eyes, and my mind was struggling halfwittedly with trigonometry and how far it was from my window to the church steeples.

2. I took a long time to go to sleep again, finally heavy with shadows.  I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew tacitly that all around me was the desert I had made and called it peace.  I didn’t want to open my eyes because I was worried about what was over my head.  The hair on the back of my neck could see that above me waited a white bubble that could see me when I moved.  It made sure I was sleeping, and I wouldn’t move a muscle.  I knew that close by was a bright village with a forum and lots of numbers and no free men and a stone boat and Americans.  Then I was exhausted, and the bubble had escaped from the back of my head into the sky that was just the right colour for my house that I had been searching for.  The bubble was my house in exile, and it floated above my head on my pillow, and it knew how far it was to the lightswitch, and it was my dream, and it was my wheel remade to fit my uneven limbs, and it always took me home again, and it stretched over my face, and it swam in the water, and the furrows on my forehead grew deep and black and I could feel the breath at the back of my nose, and the bubble wasn’t there any more and I was the bubble and I wasn’t sure if I had a third dream or if I dreamed the bubble did.

Salvador Dali, <em>Sleep</em>, 1937

Salvador Dali, Sleep, 1937

3. I dropped into my dream, slow wave and rapid eyes.  I dreamed about architecture.  There was a monastery, solid, stable and Byzantine that held the horixon down.  The ground was still my desert, but it was soft and plastic and inky like me.  I was a monument being built and held up by crutches that were sensitive to my misshapen body.  Distorted, fleshy, worrisome anthropophagus tadpole hippocampus that I was, I didn’t need limbs to sleep, and I drew far inside and just below the surface of my eyelids.  Under the shadow of my domed head, swollen by all the thoughts I had of my house, a man in a turban came around the headland and beached his boat and examined me.  He didn’t threated me because he was a nomad, and didn’t remain anywhere (even though his shadow lay long across the desert), so he didn’t exist.  And his eyes looked far away.  He was a Digger who scratched at the ground and made an abyss that he smoothed over again, and I wanted to speak but my lips were too heavy.  The moon didn’t care, but the tripod dog looked at me hard and I began to worry about my crutches.  I knew I was in a fragile state, and couldn’t get back to the water if the dog knocked me over and it was important and I couldn’t remember, and in a moment of clarity I did.  I was smiling to myself because I realized I could be right behind you and you didn’t know.  The little blanket on my back covered the back of my neck and my ears, but it didn’t cover my toes and I pulled them in and I couldn’t stay any more and the desert was my sheet and I had one eye open and the moon was the face of my watch that couldn’t be bothered marking time.

3b. My left eye was dry and my pillow was wet and I drew the back of my hand across my huge wet lips and my nose was the rocky headland and I was a world and there was running water and someone coughed.  My dream was a picture now, and I wanted to put it in my house, but I couldn’t measure it to see if it would fit.  I was on a skateboard and fell off the curb and my back kicked.

b.  I woke up and got out of bed and dragged a comb across my head, and didn’t have a comb, and chased that stupid idea dog out of my head house.  The last residue of sleep crystallized in my eyes.  I crossed the carpet, and went into the bathroom.  I spat toothiness down the plughole and washed my face down after it.  I remembered that last night while I was trying to go to sleep, I had important thoughts about designing something, or had thought of something to write.  I couldn’t remember it though:  it had fallen down between my bed and the wall, so I resigned myself to not remembering.”

( Written in 2001 for a studio brief: a project for a sleeping-space to be shared by a human and an artificial intelligence. It turns out Joyce, like cheese, is a hallucinogen. )

The Forefront of Public Awareness

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Why doesn’t the NZIA advertise?

Individual practices aren’t likely to advertise themselves much. Every practice has a website (often overdesigned and flash-laden, but let’s not go there right now). A few larger practices run ads in Architecture NZ and the like, but not in popular media. There is probably a (quite justified) feeling that the best advertisement is getting your work published or winning awards.

We need to convince people of the value of architects. If we can’t articulate to a general audience why they should hire an architect, we shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t. The NZIA claim they are concerned with “ensuring that the value of good architecture and the range of skills that architects can provide are at the forefront of public awareness”. But how exactly are they doing this? Press releases to the Herald? Who is the public that the NZIA are trying to appeal to?

Those ads for design-build companies are cringeworthy, but they have a clear value-proposition: cheap, efficient, unthreatening, large houses, in which you get to choose how big the rooms are. What is the clear value-proposition for architects? The Australian Institute of Architects ran a print and tv advertising campaign which could serve as a good model. The campaign showed off award-winning work of different types and offered memorable soundbites.

Australian Institute of Architects, print ad, 2007

Australian Institute of Architects, print ad, 2007

Doesn’t this sound like the sort of thing our Institute should be doing?

UPDATE: bit late to enter this, but I look forward to seeing what it turns up.

[ crossposted to aaa.org.nz ]

Black Maria II: Mobility

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[ Part I ]

The flickering of likeness produced by Black Maria is connected to its mobility. It does not retain a single, clearly marked likeness, because of its capacity for transformation. There are three forms of mobility which we must notice in order to understand Black Maria‘s instability and variability.

The first is the mobility of the viewer. This is common to spatial works. The viewer is not fixed in place, as is predominantly the case with pictures. This is why architecture posseses a greater degree of variability than a picture. The viewer is able to vary range and angle from the object, changing its relationship to the background, and adjusting how it is percieved: from prison wagon to wolf and on to something else.

Black Maria, however, has a capacity for transformation even when the viewer remains stationary. It has positional variability. Something that rides on wheels is not sited somewhere, it is parked. Although it sits in a Japanese park this morning, this afternoon you might find it around the corner on your way to work, or in the trees on the way to Grandma’s house. Black Maria is not positionally stable. It can be taken somewhere else and reparked. In this way the  figure-ground relationship can be modified, and the likeness correspondingly: would Black Maria be a wolf if it was not for the forest it sits in?

The third form of mobility in Black Maria is its reconfigurability. This is the mobility of the hinge. The hinge produces variability. However, it also produces constraint. Various likenesses can be produced as Black Maria is reconfigured; but the relationship between the two parts is fixed. The two parts cannot be stacked one on top of the other; nor can they be placed at a distance from one another. Their relaltionship is fixed – parameterised – by the hinge. There is a radius of possible positions for each part. The hinge separates and joins. It is an interval at the centre of Black Maria; the point on which it turns. It is where the transformation of likeness is not entirely in the hands of the viewer.

The deconstructive concept of free play has been badly understood by some to mean (false and yet somehow a truism) that anything can mean anything. If it were possible to conceive of a variability without constraint, likeness would become so generalised as to lose the ability to signify. Umberto Eco writes, “A similarity or an analogy, whatever its epistemological status, is important if it is exceptional, at least under a certain description. An analogy between Achilles and a clock based on the fact that both are physical objects is of no interest whatsoever” (Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 1992, 63).

Equally important for the play of significance in Black Maria is that it fails. It fails to hold a single consistent likeness, without having the good manners to refrain from any likeness at all. It does not fail to correspond; but it fails to correspond in a stable way.

[ Part III ]

[ Refs. ]

Black Maria I: Likeness

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nakao2nakao4

It is part of the internal necessity of Hiroshi Nakao’s Black Maria (1994) that it is likened to something. It is like a dancer’s legs, a severed brushstroke, a wolf, a paddy wagon. One half of Black Maria tapers, the other bifurcates. When the two halves are folded together they form a maw with fishbones stuck vertically, a basking shark on wheels grazing in a Japanese park, through the gills of which it is possible to slip out. When the two halves are spread, it is an elongated splinter, a shallow stage, two carriages of a train.

None of these likenesses are preserved for long. They flicker and appear, sometimes simultaneously, and then they slip quietly away in favour of another. Likeness is an often-derided architectural mechanism. It is a well-rehearsed method of critical derogation to liken an unfavoured work to something facetious. Likeness is taken to indicate shallowness. Equally, likeness is sometimes considered to be a weak form of criticism. A weak critic can do no more than say this is like that. Likeness might even be shameful.

Black Maria could be seen as a mechanism for producing likenesses. A likeness is not a representation in the simple sense. Not all representations are likenesses (the word ‘dog’ does not need to be like a dog in any way to represent a dog) Nor are all likenesses representations. Incidental likenesses are possible (Black Maria does not represent a basking shark, but it is like one in certain ways). Likeness opens the philosophical problem of correspondence. When we say something corresponds, are we identifying an objective relationship, or merely observing something about our own correspondence-finding mechanisms? The later Wittgenstein argues that correspondence is just another rule in a language-game. Others have argued that correspondence is a basic principle of logic (certainly symbolic logic). To account for likeness, we need to expand our view of architecture as a representational system beyond a simple one-to-one correspondence (a naive theory of picturing or signifying).

In Black Maria, likeness flickers. But how does it produce this flickering? Is it simply that it is given to us as an ‘exhibit’ and we understand that exhibits are meant to be read like this? Is it the fact that Black Maria is exhibited in a particular way that prompts the flickering of likenesses? Possibly. Probably. But for a little, I want to speak for the idea that the work is somehow constructed in such a way as to produce this flickering.

[ Part II ]

[ Part III ]

[ Refs. ]

This is Bad Architecture

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08-08-09_1509

Just look at it. It’s the hulking proto-slum looming over Broadway. Go stare at it in sickened wonder some time. It’s a thoughtless, ugly cardboard model with gigantism. It offers absolutely zero to the public realm, and I don’t imagine the private spaces are in any way pleasant either. It’s greedy and selfish. It’s made of the absolute cheapest possible materials. You think it looks bad now? Wait a few years. The programme is appropriate; the scale of the development is appropriate. But it’s Bad Architecture.

Thanks ACC, for giving this a pass. Thanks developers, for pricing human space so cheaply. Thanks architect, for nothing.

[ crossposted to aaa.org.nz ]

Density

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paris - boulevards

Density is one of the most pressing issues for architecture in New Zealand’s cities. Auckland is renowned, or perhaps infamous, for its low density. Compared to cities of similar population:

Auckland (1.3 million inhabitants), 1 209 per square kilometer

Turin (0.9 million inhabitants), 6 994 per square kilometer

Fukuoka (1.4 million inhabitants), 4 061 per square kilometer

For reference:

Mumbai (13.6 million inhabitants), 21 880 per square kilometer

Density is necessary. Density will occur. Densification is not something we are free to weigh up, accept or reject. Population growth and urban drift will produce higher density. More people must live in a smaller area. It is of course possible to refuse to acknowledge this, but if New Zealand were to continue to develop without increasing density in its cities, it would be unique in the world, and it would rapidly consume what most New Zealanders would agree it it’s most precious resource: its land, air, waters, flora, and fauna.

New Zealanders, it is often asserted, require space and openness, and are therefore unlikely, or some might say, unable to live in a dense city. But openness is not opposed to density. On the contrary, it is density that permits openness. Density preserves or sustains openness. Is it possible to imagine a less open condition than that represented by the suburbs of Botany Downs, parcelled up by fences and split by six-lane roads?

Many people feel that density comes down to importing foreign models. The primary architectural type in NZ is the detached house, while in other architectural traditions, collective housing is a well-developed type. It is also true that there are some very poor instances of densification in Auckland. Density has been hijacked by developers for whom it is simply a way to maximise profit. The virtues and benefits of density are undermined by this. The message cannot be “well folks, density is real, so here’s your shoebox, suck it up soldier”. There are very real architectural problems to be solved in order for density to work. Where can I dry my clothes, have a bbq, play cricket, work on the Holden? Architects don’t design objects, they design lives: movements, sensory experiences, social relationships, backgrounds, paths, cases, patterns of activity. People need to convinced of the benefits of density, and assured that life can actually continue in, or be enhanced by, a denser setting.

Perhaps one of the problems is that we lack appealing models for density. Block diagrams comparing density can only take us so far, and could be accused of engendering the very sterility they claim to expose. Instead of telling people off for wasteful living, architects need to be proactive in demonstrating the positive attributes of densification. We cannot herd people into a denser city. We need to produce a desire for density.

[ cross-posted to aaa.org.nz ]